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Blog postMarx argued that the expropriation of surplus value by capitalists is the main source of the oppression and exploitation of the members of the working class. What is surplus value, how is it expropriated, and why is this expropriation exploitative? Capitalists are the owners of the forces of production (machines, soil, buildings, infrastructure, etc.). This… Continue reading What Did Marx Mean When He Talked About Exploitation and Surplus Value? →
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Blog postSome people don’t believe in the universal validity of human rights and democracy. They say that human rights and democracy aren’t meant for them, or aren’t meant for somebody else. They forget, however, that you can’t question, challenge or refute human rights and democracy for the simple reason that the act of questioning, challenging or… Continue reading The Anti-democrat’s Paradox →
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Blog postItai Sneh (not pictured) has an interesting and thorough review of one of my books here.
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Blog postShould we be allowed to intervene in a country for the purpose of promoting democracy and human rights, if the people in this country don’t want to have a democracy or human rights? If they do want to have democracy and rights, then it’s of course, possible and acceptable, maybe even necessary to assist them… Continue reading The Thorny Bush of Democracy Promotion Abroad →
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Blog postSometimes people come up to me at parties with a “so I hear you’re a writer of some sort”. Not actually because that is something someone does get to hear now and again. I’m way too obscure for that. I suspect most of the times this happens because the person in question has just talked to my wife and asked her about what it is exactly that I do.
So anyway, I have this standard joke when I get a “so I hear you’re a writer of some sort”. I tell the pe -
Blog postSome words about the epistemological status – or the truth value – of the narrative contained in this blog. I argue that all writing about human rights and democracy is a mere proposal and an attempt at truth. Whenever I say something about those topics I do not pretend to proclaim the truth. If there is any truth in… Continue reading Adventures in Meta-Blogging: What is the Truth Value of Writing About Rights? →
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Blog postI saw this vandalized movie poster the other day, and I tried to be funny on Twitter (something about anti-consumerist primates, about Caesar not wanting his struggle to be commodified by the movie industry).
But this got me thinking. Assuming that the apes do take over our planet, what kind of economy are they likely to create? I’m not happy with the movie answers to this question. The movies – both the original sixties movies and the new rebooted series – depict an unconvincing econ -
Blog postMoral philosophy is an infamous mess. However, this mess, which moral philosophers have inadvertently foisted upon us, may in the end do us a favor: by trying in vain to come up with a coherent and convincing system of morality moral philosophers may have shown that there isn’t in fact something called morality. But let’s take a few steps back… Continue reading There Is No Morality, and That’s a Good Thing →
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Blog postNo more than a shadow in a mirror; a mirror which is in fact no more than a mere window; a window which is just a collection of moving atoms; atoms which are themselves no more than moving particles. The mere shadow itself was only a photon variation. There’s nothing redeeming about it all. “But… Continue reading 7th Treatise On The Nature of Meaning and Beauty in the World →
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Blog postSome say that we live in a computer simulation, and that we just don’t know it yet. Perhaps God-like creatures, on another planet somewhere, have colonised us and put us in Matrix-style liquid-filled pods, our brains attached to a computer and fed with fake experiences. Proponents of the simulation hypothesis rightly point out that it may be wrong to call such experiences “fake”. We do have them after all, and whether these experiences come from a real world interacting wi
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Blog postSorry for the prolonged silence, but nothing interesting and novel enough to say. Hence, in lieu of thoughts, some images. I still have this picture book to “sell” (it’s for free actually):
Available here:
http://www.blurb.com/ebooks/reader.html?e=389677
and here:
https://itunes.apple.com/be/book/portraits-and-profiles/id645974194?mt=11
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Blog postSo we were in Berlin last weekend, and we passed the Holocaust Memorial next to the Reichstag. Our 5 year old son was intrigued by the structure and went ahead of us and entered it. He then started to use it as a playground, a maze, to play hide-and-seek. Of course, I wasn’t seeking. He still had a lot of fun, but I had mixed feelings, as you can probably understand.
On the one hand, he was showing a lack of respect for the dead. This – giv -
Blog postEvery theory of justice should be boring and dull. Dullness is what justice is all about. “It depends on”, “it’s complicated”, “it varies”, “it’s very nuanced”, “it’s somewhere in between” should be the phrases populating any philosophical work on justice. Clear and simple principles, even if arrived at through nuanced and complex reasoning, are an… Continue reading Dullness is the First Principle of Justice →
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Blog postOf course, I should say “my blog”, but if we assume, unscientifically, that my experience is shared by many other bloggers then some of you may find my answers to the question in the title somewhat useful.
Almost nobody reads my blog these days. I’ve gone from a high point of about 10,000 pageviews a day – a respectable and higher than average number – to 20 or so. (Hi mom!). Whereas failure or success are subjective notions and to some extent in the eye of the beholder, they are fair -
Blog postOver the last few months, we’ve been seeing an increase in media coverage of the plight of refugees and migrants trying to make the journey to Western Europe. Here’s a graph from Google Trends:
It started with events in Calais and then shifted eastwards to Hungary, Greece and other countries around the Mediterranean. Somehow, the focus is now more on refugees than on migrants, perhaps because there are now more refugees coming across from countries such as Syria. Some argue that the r -
Blog postAbout 6 months ago, I decided to do a bit a self-experimentation. I tried to identify as many of my illusions as I could, and then see if I could lose them one by one. Readers of this blog – those who are still around – may have noticed one of the first: that this is an interesting blog. I stopped writing after decades of what often seemed like talking to a wall. After all, if few other people like what I do, then why should I? Wisdom of the crowds, and such. But that’s hardly
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Blog post[The drought of my inspiration continues, I’m afraid, so here’s another golden oldie. Tyler Cowen linked to it on Marginal Revolution at the time I first published it some years ago, so it must be good. Argumentum ad verecundiam, I know.] One result of human rights measurement is a spatial pattern of human rights, a… Continue reading Which Changes in the Spatial Pattern of Human Rights Are Most Likely? →
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Blog post[You may have noticed a lack of blog posts recently. At least I hope you have. For personal reasons I’ve been having a hard time writing anything these last weeks, so here’s one from the archive (with a new title). It’s almost 5 years old but I still think it’s one of my best.]
Human rights have many functions, but their most important one is perhaps the institution and the protection of a public space and a public life for every individual. This is especially true of freedo
Titles By Filip Spagnoli
